Look who's defending Obama

Well, yet another soft-on-crime, communistic type has come out and said that the Republicans should stop yelping about Obama and Blago: Newt Gingrich. Via Ben Smith, Newt's letter to RNC chair Mike Duncan:

I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over seventy years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative, attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.

The recent web advertisement, "Questions Remain," is a destructive distraction. Clearly, we should insist that all taped communications regarding the Senate seat should be made public. However, that should be a matter of public policy, not an excuse for political attack.

In a time when America is facing real challenges, Republicans should be working to help the incoming President succeed in meeting them, regardless of his Party.

From now until the inaugural, Republicans should be offering to help the President-elect prepare to take office.

Furthermore, once President Obama takes office, Republicans should be eager to work with him when he is right, and, when he is wrong, offer a better solution, instead of just opposing him.

This is the only way the Republican Party will become known as the "better solutions" party, not just an opposition party. And this is the only way Republicans will ever regain the trust of the voters to return to the majority.

This ad is a terrible signal to be sending about both the goals of the Republican Party in the midst of the nation's troubled economic times and about whether we have actually learned anything from the defeats of 2006 and 2008.

The RNC should pull the ad down immediately.

Obviously, Newt is being tactical here. I would assume he's thinking of mounting a presidential campaign in 2012, and he sees the opening in being the guy who positions himself as the "better solutions" candidate. That isn't the worst idea I've ever heard of.

The Republicans undoubtedly don't care about my free advice, but if anyone wants it, it's this: they need to be seen as less extreme and ideological. It's really about that simple. Despite the size and scope of Obama's victory, many "average" Americans are still fairly conservative. Not right-wing, but fairly conservative, in a suburban, small-town, church-going, I-just-want-to-live-my-life kind of way.

That conservatism contains elements of libertarianism -- belief in right to privacy, non-hatred of gay people, etc. -- and of communitarianism -- i.e., that sometimes we do need government and need to act as a people. But it is basically more conservative than not.

The GOP needs to position itself there. But instead it just keeps moving farther and farther to the right. It's like they're on some kind of ideological heroin that keeps them getting more and more extreme, more and more addicted. They just need to move about 15 degrees back toward the middle and they'll be competitive again, I expect.

It's a lot harder than it sounds, though, because it means reigning in the religious right. Just as the Democrats had to buck some of their key interest groups in the 1990s to restore their mainstream reputation, the GOP has to do that now. Mostly with the evangelicals, but also with Kool-aid drinkers of other stripes, like the nutsos who deny global warming and such.

Maybe Gingrich sees this and agrees. Having lived -- led! -- a period of towering GOP "noism," in which the point was to block and say no to everything, perhaps he's actually learned the proper lesson from that period: that he got his ass kicked six ways to Sunday, as we say in the US of A. He lost the p.r. war to Clinton. He didn't drive Clinton from office. He ended up losing his own job. His party, to the average person, looked like a bunch of lunatics.

Pretty funny it would be if Gingrich turns out to be the middle- or soft-conservative candidate of '12. But the worm turns in unpredictable ways.

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